Can a President Delegate the Economics Stuff?

John McCain says that he's "really never understood" economics, and that he might give responsibility for economy to a more financially-literate vice-president. Is that realistic? I think that maybe it is. There are certain areas where a president really has to make the big decisions himself, and those areas center on foreign policy. But I don't think that fiscal policy needs a hands-on president: Bill Clinton, for one, was never better at fiscal policy than when he sat back and let Bob Rubin make the decisions and do most of the talking.

That said, however, Clinton is no one's idea of an economic naif, and you can be sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he signed on to Rubin's plan to, say, bail out Mexico from its tequila crisis. I suspect that in order to make such a decision one needs to understand the issues in some depth: it would be incredibly hard to simply sign on the dotted line because your vice-president and treasury secretary told you to do so.

McCain does have a long – a very long – list of economic advisors, including some pretty illustrious names: John Taylor, Anne Krueger, Ken Rogoff, Mark Zandi. But there are 36 advisors in all, which seems ridiculously excessive to me and seems to guarantee a cacophony of conflicting advice. I don't think anybody is capable of boiling down the advice of 36 different advisors into a single coherent economic policy, and I worry that a McCain White House would suffer from that problem, especially if the vice-president, the treasury secretary, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors all started saying different things.

McCain does have a man in mind who he might turn to for adjudication, however:

"I would like to have someone I'm close to that really is a good strong economist. As long as Alan Greenspan is around I would certainly use him for advice and counsel."

I'm sure Brad DeLong would approve.